Tag Archives: region|US

FTC warns some PC manufacturers that they’re violating right to repair rules

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The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is reminding several computer companies that "warranty void if removed" stickers are illegal, as is language discouraging consumers from fixing their own devices. The Commission warned ASRock, Gigabyte and Zotech to get rid of them and remove terms threatening to void warranties if users break the seal, it wrote in a press release spotted by The Verge. 

"Letters to three other companies warn against their use of stickers containing 'warranty void if removed' or similar language that are placed in locations on products that hinder consumers’ ability to perform routine maintenance and repairs on their products," the FTC wrote. "These letters were issued to ASRock, Zotac, and Gigabyte, companies that market and sell gaming PCs, graphics chips, motherboards, and other accessories."

It wasn't just the stickers, but language in the warranties stating that guarantees would be voided if said seals were broken. The practices "may be standing in the way of consumers' right to repair products they have purchased," according to the release. Commission staff will review the companies' websites after 30 days and failure to correct violations may result in law enforcement action. 

Right to repair laws have spread across US states, but the FTC is actually referencing decades-old rules. Under the 1975 Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, companies can't place restrictions on repairs unless they provide the parts or services for free or receive a waiver from the FTC. 

This isn't a new occurrence, as we wrote about a similar warning from the FTC way back in 2018. At that time, the watchdog sent warnings to six companies: Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, ASUS, HTC and Hyundai. Such stickers and policies aren't necessarily illegal in other nations though, as iFixit wrote last year. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ftc-warns-some-pc-manufacturers-that-theyre-violating-right-to-repair-rules-120009736.html?src=rss

The Morning After: Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip 6 and Fold 6 leak early

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We already told you what to expect, but if you demand more proof, the leakers will oblige. This time, @evleaks on X released copies of product pages (and images) for the Galaxy Z Fold 6 and Galaxy Z Flip 6.

The main spec changes are for the flip. Previous Galaxy Z Flip models only had 12-megapixel rear cameras, so the Flip 6's purported 50-megapixel wide camera (paired with a 12-megapixel ultrawide) is a huge upgrade. If the leak is accurate, it'll also have a bigger battery.

According to the product pages, Samsung didn't give the Galaxy Z Fold 6 many substantial upgrades, but the new model will have a slightly larger front display. Conversely, the folding main display is slightly smaller and the phone is a bit thinner.

The leak spoils Samsung’s July 10 party a little, but we reckon the company has plenty more to show off, including the official debut of its Galaxy Ring, Galaxy Watch 7, Galaxy Watch Ultra, Galaxy Buds 3 and Galaxy Buds 3 Pro. That’s a lot to get through in a single presentation — hopefully, Samsung keeps a tight run-time for my sanity.

– Mat Smith

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Japan’s Digital Agency announced on Wednesday it ditched the use of outdated floppy disks to operate its government computer systems. The only system still in place that requires the use of floppy disks is an environmental system that monitors vehicle recycling, according to Reuters. Digital Minister Taro Kono told the news agency in a statement, “We have won the war on floppy disks on June 28!”

Kono’s battle against outdated tech in government departments started in 2022. I. The country’s love affair with fax machines is well known — Kono has his sights on those next.

Continue reading.

While some apps still need extra support to run on Windows on Arm, the Surface Laptop 7 and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chip have combined to create a nearly ideal platform for everyday productivity. The design is appealing, the battery life is excellent and the display is bright. The price is premium, starting at $1,300, but Microsoft has finally nailed the Arm-powered laptop.

Continue reading.

Proton now has its own version of Google Docs in its own cloud storage service, and like the company's other products, it comes with end-to-end encryption. The company says its flavor of Docs "offers a unique solution in a market where most popular products neglect privacy" and recommends it for use in the healthcare, media, finance, and legal industries. Like Google Docs, Proton Docs has advanced formatting and image embed options. You’ll also be able to pull other document formats into Proton for editing, like Word files.

Continue reading.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-samsungs-galaxy-z-flip-6-and-fold-6-leak-early-111522211.html?src=rss

The best 4th of July sales from Apple, Amazon, Anker and more

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July 4 isn't really a boon for tech deals. Seasonal sales can be hit or miss if you have things like headphones, tablets and other tech gear on your shopping list — you're actually better off looking for early Prime Day deals (if you're a Prime member) right now, since Amazon has already kicked off the discounts in preparation for its July Prime Day event. But we scoured the internet to find as many of the worthwhile tech deals you can get for July 4 — many of them overlap with Prime Day deals, but there are some from the likes of Solo Stove, Casetify, ThermoWorks and others that appear to be limited-time, seasonal discounts. Here are the best July 4 tech deals you can get this year.

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-best-4th-of-july-sales-from-apple-amazon-anker-and-more-090027133.html?src=rss

Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6 and Z Fold 6 product pages have been leaked

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The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6 will come with a 50-megapixel rear camera for the first time, a bigger battery than any of its predecessors and a bunch of AI features, according to the product pages leaked by Evan Blass on Substack. Also known as @evleaks on X/Twitter and other avenues, Blass is known to have a good track record for leaking accurate information about unreleased devices. This time, evleaks has obtained and released copies of product pages for the Galaxy Z Fold 6 and Galaxy Z Flip 6 ahead of an Unpacked event happening on July 10, though the details aren't absolutely certain until Samsung itself announces them. 

Previous Galaxy Z Flip models only had 12-megapixel rear cameras, so the Flip 6's 50-megapixel wide camera (paired with a 12-megapixel ultrawide) is a huge upgrade. Unlike the previous versions that were equipped with 3,700 mAh batteries, the upcoming model will apparently have a 4,000 mAh battery that can power up to 20 hours of internet browsing on WiFi, up to 23 hours of video playback and up to 68 hours of music playback. Meanwhile, the model's display dimensions, for both its main and external displays, are similar to the Z Flip 5. 

One of the phone's most interesting AI tools, perhaps, is its personal interpreter function that can display translations on both of its screens. That way, if you're relying on the feature to talk to somebody, they can read what you're saying in their language on the external display. It could be an invaluable tool for traveling, if it's at least reasonably accurate. When the phone is folded, the Chat Assist feature will give you a way to text from the front display by giving you a selection of suggested replies. Google's Circle to Search will also be available on the device.  

Samsung didn't give the Galaxy Z Fold 6 major upgrades and changes, but the new model will come with a slightly larger front display, based on the leaked product pages. Its main display is just slightly smaller and the phone itself is a bit thinner, which make it lighter than previous models, even though its battery capacity remains the same. Like the Flip 6, the upcoming Fold will come with AI-powered features, such as Note Assist that can automatically transcribe recordings and summarize notes for you. It can also display translations from its personal interpreter on both sides of the main screen, and it has Google's Circle to Search function that you can use with the S Pen. 

The company is expected to announce both devices, as well as new accessories like the Galaxy Ring, Galaxy Watch 7, Galaxy Watch Ultra, Galaxy Buds 3 and Galaxy Buds 3 Pro at its Unpacked event in a few days. 

A phone displaying illustrations of food.
Evan Blass / @evleaks on X

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/samsung-galaxy-z-flip-6-and-z-fold-6-product-pages-have-been-leaked-015420863.html?src=rss

Your next webcam could be a Game Boy Camera

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Forget your phone cameras and laptop built-ins; your next webcam could be your old Game Boy Camera. The team (sort of) bringing this peripheral into the modern age is Epilogue. The company makes the GB Operator, which lets people play original Game Boy, Game Boy Advance and Game Boy Color cartridges on a current PC or a Steam Deck.

Today, Epilogue announced that it is working on an update that will make the Game Boy Camera into a webcam, but one that's a fuzzy, lo-fi, 16 kilopixel experience. The magic happens through the Playback emulator app that powers the GB Operator.

"We now have a live feed from the Game Boy Camera, but still need to fine-tune some things and allow for configuration options," the company said. "We wanted to share this update because it was exciting to see it finally work, and [we] can't wait to see everyone having fun with it. It's the worst and the best webcam you'll ever have."

We've seen fan projects adapting the Game Boy Camera before, and even a fan-made recreation of the hardware. Considering the original Game Boy is now more than three decades old, it's amazing to see the hardware continuing to inspire strange and creative experiences.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/your-next-webcam-could-be-a-game-boy-camera-231113749.html?src=rss

Your next webcam could be a Game Boy Camera

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Forget your phone cameras and laptop built-ins; your next webcam could be your old Game Boy Camera. The team (sort of) bringing this peripheral into the modern age is Epilogue. The company makes the GB Operator, which lets people play original Game Boy, Game Boy Advance and Game Boy Color cartridges on a current PC or a Steam Deck.

Today, Epilogue announced that it is working on an update that will make the Game Boy Camera into a webcam, but one that's a fuzzy, lo-fi, 16 kilopixel experience. The magic happens through the Playback emulator app that powers the GB Operator.

"We now have a live feed from the Game Boy Camera, but still need to fine-tune some things and allow for configuration options," the company said. "We wanted to share this update because it was exciting to see it finally work, and [we] can't wait to see everyone having fun with it. It's the worst and the best webcam you'll ever have."

We've seen fan projects adapting the Game Boy Camera before, and even a fan-made recreation of the hardware. Considering the original Game Boy is now more than three decades old, it's amazing to see the hardware continuing to inspire strange and creative experiences.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/your-next-webcam-could-be-a-game-boy-camera-231113749.html?src=rss

Cloudflare is taking a stand against AI website scrapers

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Cloudflare has released a new free tool that prevents AI companies' bots from scraping its clients' websites for content to train large language models. The cloud service provider is making this tool available to its entire customer base, including those on free plans. "This feature will automatically be updated over time as we see new fingerprints of offending bots we identify as widely scraping the web for model training," the company said.

In a blog post announcing this update, Cloudflare's team also shared some data about how its clients are responding to the boom of bots that scrape content to train generative AI models. According to the company's internal data, 85.2 percent of customers have chosen to block even the AI bots that properly identify themselves from accessing their sites.

Cloudflare also identified the most active bots from the past year. The Bytedance-owned Bytespider bot attempted to access 40 percent of websites under Cloudflare's purview, and OpenAI's GPTBot tried on 35 percent. They were half of the top four AI bot crawlers by number of requests on Cloudflare's network, along with Amazonbot and ClaudeBot.

It's proving very difficult to fully and consistently block AI bots from accessing content. The arms race to build models faster has led to instances of companies skirting or outright breaking the existing rules around blocking scrapers. Perplexity AI was recently accused of scraping websites without the required permissions. But having a backend company at the scale of Cloudflare getting serious about trying to put the kibosh on this behavior could lead to some results.

"We fear that some AI companies intent on circumventing rules to access content will persistently adapt to evade bot detection," the company said. "We will continue to keep watch and add more bot blocks to our AI Scrapers and Crawlers rule and evolve our machine learning models to help keep the Internet a place where content creators can thrive and keep full control over which models their content is used to train or run inference on."

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/cloudflare-is-taking-a-stand-against-ai-website-scrapers-220030471.html?src=rss

Japan’s government says goodbye to floppy disks

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Floppy disks may seem like a relic from an ancient time of computers but there are still places and even governments in the world that still use them to run its most basic functions. Japan is no longer one of those countries.

Japan’s Digital Agency announced on Wednesday it has rid its use of outdated floppy disks to operate its government computer systems. The only system still in place that requires the use of floppy disks is an environmental system that monitors vehicle recycling, according to Reuters.

Digital Minister Taro Kono declared in a statement to the news agency, “We have won the war on floppy disks on June 28!” Presumably, the statement wasn’t printed on that annoying dot matrix printer paper with the edges that never tear straight.

Kono’s agency started his crusade against ‘90s era computer technology in 2022 shortly after his appointment to the Digital Agency. Around 1,900 of Japan’s government procedures used floppy disks and other outdated technology such as fax machines, CDs and MiniDiscs. He famously declared “a war on floppy discs [sic]” to his 2.5 million followers on X.

Of course, Japan isn’t the only country that used to rely on floppy disks long after the rest of the world moved on to more efficient forms of data storage. The US military was still using 8-inch floppy disks to operate its Strategic Automated Command and Control System (SACCS), a 1970s computer system that received nuclear launch codes and sent emergency messages to military centers and field sources. The world learned the scary truth about SACCS thanks to CBS’s 60 Minutes and reporter Lesley Stahl. The Defense Department finally phased out the system in 2019. Let’s hope they also removed the shag carpeting and velvet upholstery.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/japans-government-says-goodbye-to-floppy-disks-214449682.html?src=rss

The Watch Dogs movie has finally started filming after 10 years

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Ever since the open world hacker adventure game Watch Dogs captured the attention of 2012’s E3, there were rumors circulating of a movie remake before the game even got a release date. Now more than 10 years later, the film version is finally happening. Ubisoft announced today on X that filming has begun on the Watch Dogs movie with a picture of a clapboard and the caption “Lights_Camera_Action.exe.”

The Watch Dogs movie was first announced in 2016 at Sony’s GamesCon press conference, according to IGN. Sony announced that Ubisoft Partners teamed up with New Regency to make a film adaptation of Aiden Pearce’s data-hacking adventure in a metropolis overseen by an intrusive server.

Since then, drips and hints of the movie’s status came and went for years until last month, when Ubisoft posted a press release announcing that production on Watch Dogs would start sometime this summer. The press release also announced that actor Tom Blyth from The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and Sophie Wilde from the sleeper horror hit Talk to Me will star in the Watch Dogs film. The movie is being directed by Mathieu Turi based on a script written by Christie LeBlanc (who wrote the 2021 Netflix sci-fi film Oxygen) with rewrites by Victoria Bata.

A few years ago, there was also talk of turning Watch Dogs and Far Cry, another big Ubisoft franchise, into an animated TV series following a run of the Rabbids Invasion cartoons. However, there’s been nothing but radio silence from those projects ever since then. Maybe if the Watch Dogs movie becomes a hit, the animated series will follow it into production.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-watch-dogs-movie-has-finally-started-filming-after-10-years-201040830.html?src=rss

This Kindle Unlimited early Prime Day deal gives you a free three-month subscription

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It's July, and that means Amazon Prime Day is just around the corner. We're seeing a lot of early Prime Day deals ahead of July 16, and the latest offer coming from within Amazon's umbrella is for the readers out there. Prime members can now lock in three months of a free Kindle Unlimited subscription, an exclusive deal that will save you $36.

As the name implies, this program offers unlimited reading of more than 4 million book titles in the KU library, free access to magazines and comics, and free listening to thousands of included audiobooks. The book library has a mix of classics, popular series and new releases across genres.

Once your three free months are up, the subscription will renew at the usual rate of $12 per month. As with most Amazon subscriptions, you can cancel at any time. We're not seeing a specific end date for when this offer will end, so interested Prime members should move fast. For voracious readers and listeners, this subscription could be a nice counterpart to the three-month free Audible subscription Amazon put on offer yesterday.

Your Prime Day Shopping Guide: See all of our Prime Day coverage. Shop the best Prime Day deals on Yahoo Life. Follow Engadget for Prime Day tech deals. Hear from Autoblog’s experts on the best Amazon Prime Day deals for your car, garage, and home, and find Prime Day sales to shop on AOL, handpicked just for you.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/this-kindle-unlimited-early-prime-day-deal-gives-you-a-free-three-month-subscription-195856022.html?src=rss